Saints Go Marching Out

It's only been three days and already I miss the Saints.


I miss the scary raw talent. I miss the maddening unpredictability. I miss the donnybrooks on the team plane. I miss the Droopy Dog owner comparing his million-dollar players to a high school team. I miss the quarterback with the 19th-best passer rating in the game, the guy who threw a pass backwards this season, calling himself "a great quarterback." I miss the Bayou Rudy kick returner who used to drive a beer truck.


All those forward throws in the playoffs? Boring!
I miss the half-time explosions from the coach. I miss a team so beautifully screwed up that when Kyle Turley and Mike Martz looked over at them on the TV in the middle of their fracas, they surely thought, "Wow, those guys are really messed up." I miss the kind of guts it took to come back from a 4-8 start and reach the doorstep of the playoffs. I miss a team so cool and loose and so perfectly comfortable on the razor's edge that they made the Carolina Panthers look like a bunch of Nervous-Nellie spelling bee kids on Sunday.